Tattoo You

Tattooed Inuit Woman.

Le premier Pink Floyd.

In a new Syd Barrett biography
that was recently published in France its author, Emmanuel Le Bret, can
get quite lyrical from time to time. How this reacts, interferes or
enriches the biography is a question that will be further investigated
in our review to be published here in a while (see: Barrett:
first in space!). But the Church can’t of course not
ignore some Iggy statements to be found in a chapter well spend on The
Madcap Laughs:

The fifth song is Sphère Sombre (Dark Globe), a title
inspired by Lord Of The Rings. It is one of the strongest moments of the
album, a song where Barrett can once again demonstrate his writing
talents…

Then, in fine French tradition, starts an in-depth review of some of the
themes to be found in Dark Globe. What to think of the following:

There is an allusion to the drug opium that is smoked lying on the floor
and that explains the following verse: “my head kissed the ground”. “I'm
only a person with Eskimo chain” is of course about his short episode
with Iggy, who was half Inuit!

The opium reference is quite far-fetched and the head down / ground
image symbolism can be found in several Syd songs:I'll lay my head
down and see what I see - Love SongShe loves to see me get down to
ground - She Took A Long Cold LookCreep into bed when your head's on
the ground - It Is Obvious.

That the Eskimo Chain verse could refer to Ig is something that the
Church has wondered about before in When
Syd met Iggy... (Pt. 3) , but according to JenS, who knew both Iggy
and Syd in the Sixties this is quite a preposterous idea:

Syd wrote songs and not all of them were about one person or another. It
was his job.His songs were more often a jumble of ideas put together
to serve his purpose. I think it’s risky, even though you like the idea,
to project this as it just leads to further mythologizing. Syd was not
romantically inclined this way.“I'm only a person with Eskimo chain”
refers to the evolutionary chain, not to a specific person. He was on a
very much higher spiritual plane, not so much on the material.I find
this idea quite funny and I just hear Syd roaring with laughter.

But Emmanuel Le Bret mythologizes, to use JenS’ discourse, even a bit
further…

The famous verse ‘I tattooed my brain all the way’, which was a splendid
headline for the tabloids, has an extraordinary evocative power. Of all
the significances one can find, we may not forget, that in Inuit
shamanic tradition, there is a tattooing tradition (as with the Maori)
to tattoo the skull in blue. One could interpret these words as an
allusion to the ritual initiation to enter Iggy’s ‘family’.

Lars
Krutak, an anthropologist who specializes in body adornments, has
written about Inuit tattoos:

Arctic tattoo was a lived symbol of common participation in the cyclical
and subsistence culture of the arctic hunter-gatherer. Tattoo recorded
the “biographies” of personhood, reflecting individual and social
experience through an array of significant relationships that oscillated
between the poles of masculine and feminine, human and animal, sickness
and health, the living and the dead. Arguably, tattoos provided a nexus
between the individual and communally defined forces that shaped Inuit
and Yupiget perceptions of existence… (Taken from: Vanishing
Tattoo. An updated version of the same article can be found at: Lars
Krutak.)

Although all the writings of Lars Krutak are very interesting it would
take us to far to dig further into the specifics of tribal tattooing.
Further more, regardless of the fact that ‘Eskimo chain’
may well or not refer to Iggy, who may have acted as a muse for Syd,
rather than the groupie some biographers have made of her, she probably
was not Inuit at all.

And as far as the Reverend can see, with his little piggy eyes, he
cannot distinguish any tattoos on her body.